Joni Ernst and Smoke of Mass Destruction

That Generals are always fighting the last war has become a cliche. It became conventional wisdom after World War I, the War to End All Wars. That was the war during which young soldiers were sent to fight machine guns with their chests because sending minimally protected troops onto the battlefield had worked before.

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Prior to that, the American Civil War was fought by groups of soldiers trained to huddle together and shoot in unison, a tactic that had been honed to success against muskets in the Revolution. The Revolution was won by untrained militia hiding behind rocks and trees who fought against well trained battle hardened soldiers who wore bright red coats and marched in a straight line, as history had taught the generals.

So yeah, generals did fight the last war. The more global truth was that politicians always fought the last war.

After the World War that came after the War to End All Wars, Dean Acheson was confronted with a new kind of war. He fought against political opponents to formulate a response to a form of aggression that the world had not seen in modern times. He put together a composite strategy of aid to countries on the ragged economic edge, military aid, and nuclear deterrence. The multi-pronged approach was called Containment. The new terrain was called the Cold War.

The new structures included NATO, MLF, SEATO, and the Marshall Plan. They were derided by conservatives, led by then Senator Richard Nixon as the“Cowardly College of Communist Containment.” Presumably, the braver course, the conservative course, would have been a very hot war.

The long twilight struggle represented by the Cold War was predicated on the idea that the prime generator of evil in the world was a monolithic conspiracy directed from a single room in the Kremlin. The theory, even in retrospect, seems to have worked reasonably well in Europe and most of the Western world.

The price paid by subjugated populations was high. Freedom is a terrible thing to lose. But the Soviet Empire was confined to its illegitimate boundaries, where internal contradictions would eventually lead to collapse.

The problem was the theory outlived itself. Lessons of the 1950s were applied everywhere. But it turned out the great monolith of Europe was not a worldwide conspiracy. In much of the world, indigenous conflicts had local causes and local participants. In Vietnam, we discovered the cost of treating a mostly sectarian struggle as something larger. The cost in American lives came close to 60,000. The cost to the Vietnamese people most probably numbered in multiple millions. The cost to the Soviet Union was approximately zero.

The hard lessons of the Cold War continued to be applied for decades after the Soviet Union disintegrated. Destruction was not directed by a single point of evil. It was a series of several points, with dictatorships in more than one country operating independently, although often in cooperation with each other.

That lesson was applied after the 9/11 attacks. The only question was which dictatorship was responsible for that act of mass murder. The idea that a comic book villain in a cave on the other side of the world could have directed such destruction seemed hopelessly naive to policymakers. They quickly settled on the real culprit and set their sites on Iraq. Saddam Hussein was behind it.

What they possessed in confidence, they lacked in evidence. They knew what they knew, but they couldn’t prove it. America had to attack Iraq’s dictatorship, but America had to be convinced.

I have to confess once more that I was among the convinced. Mushroom clouds over Manhattan were a bit much to contemplate.

Only later did we find that independent evidence had not been so independent. It had been planted with a few journalists with a low level of integrity. It had been supplemented by false confessions gotten by torture. It had been complemented by others with their own agendas. It had been made up out of whole cloth. Our President, and his administration, had been blowing smoke at us.

They had known all along the story of destructive weapons was bogus. But they also knew that the evidence was needed to convince America to attack. And they knew the attack was essential. The World Trade Center still smoldered in rubble. The Pentagon had been hit by a third plane. A fourth plane was in the ground in Pennsylvania.

They could not let Saddam Hussein get away with it, even if they could not prove he was responsible. The cartoonish figure at Bora Bora was an incidental figure. They could dispose of bin Laden after they had dealt with his sponsor.

The very notion that a privately funded and controlled radical movement could transcend national boundaries, could be independent of any sovereign state, contradicted everything that former Cold Warriors had learned in the long, bitter struggle against splintered opposition during the Cold War. Ho Chi Minh had not been controlled by a large monolithic conspiracy, but he had controlled a country.

I was reminded of the great deception in the cause of mistaken revenge, of a President blowing smoke at us, as I read the latest on the phantom Weapons of Mass destruction.

The leading candidate to become the next Senator from the great state of Iowa was interviewed by the Des Moines Register. Joni Ernst revealed new intelligence, unknown to ordinary citizens.

I do have reason to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

– Joni Ernst, Republican candidate for the US Senate, May 13, 2014

She later tried to clarify. She issued a statement acknowledging that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion. What she had meant to say was that Iraq had had those weapons in the years before the invasion.

It does strike me as a bit of a strain to get that interpretation from the presentation she made in person.

In the original interview, a staffer at the newspaper was incredulous. He asked if she really truly thought there were such weapons in Iraq at the time of the invasion. She repeated her assertion.

I have reason to believe there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I will tell you my husband served in Saudi Arabia as an Army Central Command sergeant major for a year and that’s a hot-button topic in that area.

It could be I have it wrong. My loved one sometimes reminds me that I’ve been wrong before. One of those times was when I thought President Bush, the President of the United States, my President, was telling the truth about nuclear weapons.

The first time Joni Ernst said she had reason to believe there were weapons of mass destruction as we invaded, I do have reason to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it sounded to me as if she was actually saying she believed there had been such weapons.

When she repeated that she had reason to believe there were weapons as we invaded, I have reason to believe there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and added that her husband was in a position to verify that there were such weapons it seemed to me she was saying she believed it.

She does now say she actually meant something other than what she repeated … well … repeatedly. As a Senator, it’s hard to know what she will believe the next time a Republican President blows smoke at us, especially the smoke of mass destruction.

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